Solid Leadership More Important Than Ever in an Uncertain 2021

We often don’t know how good a leader, or any governing body, is until they confront a major stress test. The obvious example of this is the United States’ appallingly botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Month after month since March of last year, the country’s lack of preparation and absence of even an acceptable level of leadership was revealed in disastrous and devastating ways.

Businesses across the country have also been facing their biggest tests yet. While not one of them could have been totally prepared for the challenges that would come their way, some took their business models in an unexpected direction to keep income flowing. Others, whose leaders either couldn’t come up with a successful new way of doing business or were too resistant to change, haven’t stood a chance.

Last August, Fortune, as a number of business-focused media outlets have, highlighted several businesses that made successful pivots during the pandemic. They included:

• Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, which offered “Staycation at the M.O.” packages including early check-in and late check-out, room service and a bottle of wine, as well as home delivery of the luxury hotel’s food, cake shop items and spa supplies.
• David Dodge, a Pennsylvania car dealership that sold more vehicles in July 2020 than any other month in its 15-year history after aggressively shifting its business practices to fit the new, socially-distanced world. This included the owner placing his desk prominently inside the front door so he would be visible to customers, creating a business development center to consolidate online leads, accompanying customers on test-drives via FaceTime and offering home vehicle delivery.

The theme of this month’s print issue, “Leadership in 2021,” is especially fitting as we enter a new year that feels nothing like any of our past new years. This year, credit union executives’ ability to lead during a time of disruption is more important than ever to the industry’s continued success. Leaders must be flexible, open-minded, willing to do things they may have never imagined doing before and comfortable with the idea of making continuous changes to their plans.

The many challenges business leaders have been facing since last March include learning to manage a newly-remote staff; keeping staff (both remote and onsite) engaged and productive despite distractions, and ensuring employees’ well-being at a time when many of them are facing hardship.

An online collection of content posted by Gallup, “Resilience at Work: Leading the Post-Pandemic Workplace,” offers advice on these topics, with successful management of remote workers being a key theme of the various challenges of the post-pandemic business world. In the article “How to Build Trust and Boost Productivity Within Remote Teams,” Gallup debunked the common myth that people who work from home are less productive: “The stigma of remote work is that it inhibits collaboration and productivity, which together may cost companies money. But we haven’t seen any data to support these fears yet.”

Those who started to work remotely because of the pandemic are close to a year into their new lifestyle, and many of them aren’t looking back – five in 10 workers say they don’t want to work in an office anymore, according to Gallup. And managers are responsible for the success of their remote teams, the organization asserted. Managers who buy into the idea that being at home equates to slacking off, or have trust issues and try to micromanage their employees from afar, are less likely to see the productivity benefits that many remote teams are bringing to the table. To succeed, managers need to embrace flexibility and new communication patterns, and tap into each team member’s strengths.

No one wants to hear this, but the ongoing pandemic isn’t the last crisis leaders will confront (although we can only hope that future crises will be of a smaller scale). Another article in Gallup’s content collection, “A CEO’s Guide to Preparing for the Next Crisis,” discussed what CEOs can do now to be better prepared the next time you-know-what hits the fan, and offered five key tips:

• Embrace the diversity of thought and viewpoints found among executives and team members at the organization. Be open-minded to varying approaches to problem-solving instead of tackling challenges from one angle. “CEOs must know the strengths and weaknesses of each team member very well so they can deploy people tactically – and effectively.”
• Build and nurture strong partnerships and alliances. For credit unions, this includes the relationships that exist between different departments within the credit union, between a credit union and a vendor partner such as its core provider, and even between two credit unions. According to Gallup, “… powerful partnerships can be faster and more agile, all while alleviating demands on the CEO and executive team’s time and energy. That is powerful protection when a business is under threat.”
• Put an intentional, unified talent strategy in place. “A well-executed talent strategy is always an asset, but it really pays off during upheaval: Every penny you put into developing your talent comes back in a better, faster response.”
• Define the organization’s vision, ensure all employees clearly understand it and see that the actions of leadership embody it. “An established, shared vision for the organization creates a hierarchy of purpose, tasks and decisions across functions so that siloed objectives, insular thinking and competing perspectives don’t create an alternate reality.”
• Don’t just create a crisis response plan – test it, hold leadership accountable for it and ask a neutral third-party to evaluate it. Most organizations have failed to take these steps – a 2018 Gallup survey found that while 95% of organizations have a disaster recovery plan in place, 23% never test it.

As someone who hates uncertainty and being forced to change plans, I know how difficult the past year has been for anyone who also views him or herself as a planner. But after living through 10 months of unpredictability, I’ve found that the disappointment of unfulfilled plans has begun to sting a little less, and that it’s easier to work through each day as it comes. I hope my fellow planners have learned to develop more flexibility in the past year as well – and that all credit union leaders will take the lessons they’ve learned and apply them going forward, so they can be ready to face whatever challenges come their way in 2021.

Natasha Chilingerian is executive editor for CU Times. She can be reached at nchilingerian@cutimes.com.